Is Taylor Swift Real? A Deeply Unnecessary Investigation
Before the Swifties start fashioning tiny voodoo dolls of me out of friendship bracelets (or some of my nieces disown me), let me just say: I don’t dislike her per se, Taylor Swift. I find it particularly interesting and, to be honest, mesmerizing how she turns breakups into billion-dollar enterprises. I find it funny and rewarding that she wields the power to crash Ticketmaster and send the NFL into a mild identity crisis. But here’s my problem—every time I see her, a singular, deeply unsettling thought burrows into my brain: Is Taylor Swift real?
I know what you’re thinking. “Obviously, she’s real. We’ve all seen her. She sings. She dates. She revitalizes the economy by merely existing.” And yet, I remain unconvinced. Because something about Taylor Swift does not scream human to me. She looks, for lack of a more delicate way to put it, plastic. Not “cheap, off-brand action figure” plastic. No, no. I’m talking about that hard, vintage Barbie plastic—the kind that, if you accidentally drop her on your foot, you’re making a trip to the ER.
Her skin is eerily smooth, almost poreless, like it was laser-etched onto a mannequin. Her limbs move too precisely, as if controlled by an invisible puppeteer. Her facial expressions? Perfectly calibrated. And let’s talk about that sheen. That delicate, slightly reflective glow. That’s not a glow of natural human oils and the occasional stress breakout. That’s the glow of a very expensive, possibly lab-engineered material.
And it’s not like I feel this way about all famous people. Lana Del Rey, for example—now, she looks real. Not “normal,” necessarily. More like an immortal 1940s screen siren who’s seen things she can never unsee. But if I touched Lana’s arm, I feel confident it would be warm and have the slight give of human flesh. Taylor? I suspect she would be cold and unnervingly smooth, like she was stored in a climate-controlled glass case between performances.
Am I saying Taylor Swift is an advanced synthetic humanoid designed to optimize pop culture dominance? Not explicitly. I’m just saying that if I ever met her, I’d have to fight the overwhelming urge to knock on her arm—just to hear if it makes that solid clack clack sound that all hard plastics do. And if that makes me a conspiracy theorist, then so be it. And if one day it’s revealed that Taylor Swift has been powered by Sam Altman’s AI this whole time, and Elon Musk’s real beef with Altman isn’t about the future of artificial intelligence but his thwarted attempts to date the world’s most advanced pop-starbot—don’t say I didn’t warn you. Just promise to visit me in the bunker when the Swiftbot uprising begins.
© 2025, Lawain McNeil, Mission Surrender, LLC.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of any organization, institution, or entity.